Flannery O'Connor: A new model for apologetics
from "The New Apologetics"
This essay first appeared in The New Apologetics: Defending the Faith in a Post-Christian Era (Word on Fire). Be sure to check out the Word on Fire Classics Flannery O’Connor Collection.
Flannery O’Connor was a great writer of fiction—arguably one of the greatest in America’s history. And her grotesque, quirky, and often violent stories about outcasts and fundamentalists in the deep South were informed by a deep Catholic sensibility. But was she an apologist for the Christian faith?
The designation seems odd—even more so when we consider that the only two direct references to apologetics in her letters are rather negative in tone. In one letter, she writes that “the prevailing tenor of Catholic philosophy . . . is too often apologetic rather than dialogic. . . . Thomism usually comes in a hideous wrapper.”1 In another, she decries the desire of many Christian readers for “an apologetic fiction” that presents a formulaic, respectable faith through straightforward allegory. “Our Catholic mentality is great on paraphrase, logic, formula, instant and correct answers,” she writes. “We judge before we experience and never trust our faith to be subjected to reality.”2
Flannery O’Connor was not opposed to apologetics itself; after all, she read the innovative apologists of her time who paved the way for the ressourcement movement—theologians like Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and Romano Guardini, and even “dangerous”3 thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin. Rather, what likely irked her was the staid and even smug presentation of the faith, rooted in decades of neo-scholasticism in the Church, with which “apologetics” had become associated. It was tidy, abstract argumentation that lacked the concrete realities of history and human experience, a disincarnate “defense” that lacked “reverence” and “gentleness,” or awe and humility (1 Pet. 3:15, 16). To borrow from the title of her collection of essays, it was an apologetics that lacked mystery and manners.
Of course, in our own time, Catholics tend to face exactly the opposite problem: we so valorize dialogue, gentleness, and reverence that we forget to make a defense! This is why the balance between head and heart defined by St. Peter is so crucial; indeed, Flannery O’Connor’s life and work can be understood as a striking example of exactly this balance.
O’Connor was not shy about explaining and defending the Catholic faith in her letters and essays. This is especially true of her 150 letters to Betty Hester (identified as “A” in The Habit of Being), a credit company clerk who first caught O’Connor’s attention with a thoughtful fan letter. That Hester was an agnostic with same-sex attraction and a troubled past makes their friendship feel all the more contemporary, and O’Connor’s intellectual and spiritual support in her letters all the more instructive. In one letter to Hester, she refers playfully to her own “high powered defense reflex whateveritis,” demurring, “I know well enough that it is not a defense of the faith, which don’t need it, but a defense of myself who does.”4 But O’Connor—who alludes to great thinkers like Edith Stein, John Henry Newman, and Thomas Aquinas in their correspondence—was clearly very eager to convince her interlocutor of the truth of Catholicism.
In fact, some of her greatest one-liners can be found in her apologetical letters to Hester. She defends objective truth: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.”5 In the same letter, she defends the Incarnation and Resurrection: “For you it may be a matter of not being able to accept what you call a suspension of the laws of the flesh and the physical. . . . For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical.”6 She defends the Church as a force against nihilism: “If you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.”7 And she tells the famous story of how she defended the Real Presence of the Eucharist to a lapsed Catholic at a fancy dinner: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”8
But throughout the letters, O’Connor roots these convictions in her own personal experience, and answers Hester’s inquiries with warmth, honesty, and humor. In short, she makes her defense with “manners.” That it had an effect is evidenced by the fact that Hester did indeed become Catholic, with O’Connor serving as her Confirmation sponsor. Sadly, she eventually backpedaled and left the Church. But even then, O’Connor continued to write to her, offering a defense surrounded with kindness: “I don’t think any the less of you outside the Church than in it,” she admits, “but what is painful is the realization that this means a narrowing of life for you and a lessening of the desire for life. . . . Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will. Leaving the Church is not the solution.”9 In her last letter to Hester, sent just days before dying, O’Connor offers one final defense of Catholicism by referencing the “heresy” that you can “worship in pure spirit.”10
While O’Connor’s nonfiction is rich with apologetic insights and arguments, her stories are also, in a sense, one long defense of the faith. As Bishop Barron points out in The Pivotal Players, the master idea of her writing is “the juxtaposition of sin and grace”—the “fallen and compromised world” we human beings occupy and the “wrenching” experience of God breaking into that world to set things right.11 As O’Connor herself admitted, “All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it.”12 The drama of human depravity encountering divine grace—or, as she writes at the end of The Violent Bear It Away, “the terrible speed of mercy”13—is the unifying idea behind all her work. And she knew she was writing for secular people who didn’t believe in or even particularly care about these truths, so she strategically drew “large and startling figures” precisely to shock her readers into seeing them.14
But O’Connor doesn’t approach these religious themes in a didactic or moralizing way; rather, she displays them in their great mystery, with a holy reverence, awe, or fear. A refrain of O’Connor’s essays is the need for the writer, especially the Catholic writer, to explore reality as it truly is—and this means an exploration of mystery. “When fiction is made according to its nature, it should reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it in concrete, observable reality,” she explains. “If the writer uses his eyes in the real security of his Faith, he will be obliged to use them honestly, and his sense of mystery, and acceptance of it, will be increased.”15 The religious writer who thinks “that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him” fails to really get at the heart of the matter, and what results is the “sorry religious novel.”16
Thus, her stories enter into the mystery of iniquity—ignorance, dysfunction, cruelty, loneliness, rage, murder, rape, deceit, and the whole dark and disorienting terrain of sin and suffering. Amid this darkness, the light of grace comes, and “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Rom. 5:20). Even the devil, as O’Connor writes in one essay, frequently becomes “the unwilling instrument of grace.”17 Yet this grace, too, is a mystery; it does not look like we might expect it to. Whether it be the restless atheist Hazel Motes preaching a “Church Without Christ” only to become an ascetic for Christ, or the pious Mrs. Turpin who looks down on her neighbors only to be knocked down to see a strange revelation in the skies, O’Connor’s characters are, as Chesterton once quipped, turned upside down in order to be given the chance to see things right side up. As she put it, “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”18 In all of this—the light of God breaking into the darkness of sin and death—O’Connor’s writing takes its cue from the central mystery of the Christian faith: the Incarnation.
Flannery O’Connor was indeed an apologist, but one with a keen sense of mystery and manners. In this, she is a forerunner and model for apologetics in our time. She knew that defending the faith requires more than just ready-made answers; it requires a willingness to meet people where they are, to explore reality as it truly unfolds, and to orient the skeptical soul—even if it means a shock to the system—to its great need for the greater mercy of “the God Who Is.”19
Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 303.
O’Connor, 516.
O’Connor, 571.
O’Connor, 131.
O’Connor, 100.
O’Connor, 100.
O’Connor, 97.
O’Connor, 125.
O’Connor, 451–452.
O’Connor, 594.
Robert Barron, The Pivotal Players: 12 Heroes Who Shaped the Church and Changed the World (Park Ridge, IL: Word on Fire, 2020), 234, 219.
O’Connor, Habit of Being, 275.
Flannery O’Connor Collection, ed. Matthew Becklo (Park Ridge, IL: Word on Fire Classics, 2019), 368. Many of the letters quoted here, as well as the quoted essay from Mystery and Manners, are available in this collection.
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 34.
O’Connor, 148.
O’Connor, 163.
O’Connor, 118.
O’Connor, Habit of Being, 307.
O’Connor, 93.